This is such a delightful and easy to prepare appetizer. The inspiration, once more, comes from Vicky’s food site. The only preparation needed is for the simple pesto sauce but if you either get good quality pesto from the store ( Trader Joe’s has a good one) or make some ahead of time and keep it in the fridge or freezer, you’re in for a great and refreshing 5 minute appetizer.

Recipe

Ingredients

Cherry tomatoes

Fresh mozzarella balls

Pesto sauce

How to make: Use tooth picks or sandwich picks to make the arrangements: a) tomato-mozzarella (or tomato-basil leaf-mozzarella) and b) tomato-pesto covered mozzarella. You can buy pesto sauce in a jar or make your own pesto by using a food processor to pulp basil leaves with oil and salt. When nice and creamy, add lemon to taste and process a bit more. If you serve in a flat dish, drizzle some olive oil on top and decorate with fresh basil leaves.

Notes and tips: Serve this appetizer immediately. In this photo, I didn’t find small fresh mozzarella balls so I got bigger ones that I had to cut in half, hence the non-round shape. Also, I didn’t have fresh basil for decoration because I had pesto ready ahead of time in the fridge.